


Penance

by Aproclivity



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Grooming, Obsession, Possessive Behavior, Putting EXTREMELY CURSED in the Extremely Cursed Rarepair challenge, Richard Strand is the key but there's a reason Warren put Alex in his path, Stalking, This is a war and people get killed, Thomas Warren has a bit of a temper, Thomas Warren has an Alex Reagan voice kink, Thomas Warren is an immortal demon and alex makes his heart beat. whoops, alex reagan had a tall paul and doesn't remember it, can possibly be read as dubcon, jealousy? in MY chaos goddess cult? It's more likely than you'd think!, kind of dead dove do not eat, mental manipulation, non consensual memory erasure, thanks warren, thomas warren is the "DO IT FOR HER" meme but creepy, thomas warren makes simon reese's stalking look like it's amateur hour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24340690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/pseuds/Aproclivity
Summary: Thomas Warren needs a key, and Alex Reagan is the mold to form it into its proper form. Written for the Extremely Cursed Rare Pair meme.
Relationships: Alex Reagan/Richard Strand, Alex Reagan/Thomas Warren
Comments: 9
Kudos: 12





	Penance

**Author's Note:**

> So when this was the first thing that came up for me on the Cursed Rare Pair generator, I laughed and laughed. And then you know, writing happened. Thomas Warren is incredibly creepy in this fic. I'm sorry.

At nineteen, she sits in his office, coltish and uncertain while she twitches with a nervous energy that he would find annoying in any other instance, but with her he finds it endearing. Time has fulfilled the promise of beauty that he saw in her as a child, but she’s only half-formed. Alex Reagan is not yet who and what he knows that she’s going to grow to be. He’s excited to see it, especially given the promise when for all of her anxiousness, she just looks into his eyes to answer his question: “your ad said that you were looking for people who had experiences with odd shadows in their childhood. Feelings of being followed or things of that nature. I did. The memories of it are vague once I was adopted, but I remember it from before. I had… I had an imaginary friend.” 

Warren just leans forward, the glamour on him acting as a second skin after wearing it for so long. He’d always known that this is where he’d met Alex Reagan. It was prophesied, and Mother Tiamat’s prophecies were never wrong. “I think, Miss Reagan…” 

“Alex, please.” Her voice is quick and she just gives him a smile that he returns before he continues on. 

“Alex. That you’re exactly right for this study. We may not yet be able to fully understand what those shadows were, but we’re working on a theory.” Warren came to sit on the edge of the desk next to her, crowding in almost with his borrowed blue eyes beaming down at her. “And I believe that you’re going to be the one to help me crack it.” Alex beams up at him, and it’s almost too easy. He can see how things will work before him, dangled like a promise—dangled like the promise of Alex Reagan. 

Thomas Warren needs a key, and Alex Reagan is the mold to form it into its proper form. 

It takes him far longer than he would have liked to make the next step in their relationship possible. It’s six months before Alex accepts his offer for a drink at the ‘home’ that he’s been renting under his assumed name. Warren could have sped things up considerably, but the point was to know her, mold her in order to make it possible. He wanted Alex Reagan in his bed willingly and moaning his name, and that’s what six months brought him: a hold on her heart that he finds himself reluctant to relinquish. Love isn’t a concept that he has, not really but he’s found himself to be fond of her smiles, and the way that she laughs. And the way that her eyes sparkle over the edge of a book when the two of them are sharing a private joke. 

Alex Reagan’s love is a gift that he doesn’t want to squander while he has it—and he does, he’s certain of that because of the fact that they’d managed to make it that far in their relationship, and he knows that Alex isn’t someone who sleeps with them without being someone who she is emotionally attracted to. And the laughing in bed with him, beaming when he brings her breakfast, and the way she goes breathless when he kisses her makes Thomas Warren entirely certain of it. 

He knows that if he doesn’t end this game soon, then he’s not going to be able to. Tiamat’s purpose is too important for him to be distracted in such a way. 

“What is happening?” Alex’s voice for the first time has fear in it, and she pulls at the bindings that hold her to the chair in front of the machine that she had woken up in. “Thomas, please. I don’t understand. Where am I? What the hell is this?”

Warren kisses her one last time, he can’t help it and he knows that Tiamat devours her fear, she’s a jealous goddess and he knows that she hasn’t liked this one bit. He sighs into the kiss and then pulls away with his fingertips brushing her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Alexandra. I’ve been putting this off for too long as it is. As much as I’d like to keep you, you’ve got a bigger role in this than you can ever imagine.”

“A bigger role in _what_? What are you talking about?” Her voice is desperate and Alex jerks away from the hand on her cheek. 

“You’re going to help open the door, Alex. You don’t understand it now, but you will. In the meantime, I’m so sorry for what’s about to happen. If there was another way to forge the Key I would do it.”

“The key? The door? Have you lost your mind? Thomas please!” Alex’s voice is soft and begging, hurting and there’s a moment when he wants to stop. But Warren can’t. Instead he just turns the button on on the machine. Alex just starts to scream loudly and she writhes as the machine draws all of the memories that are twisted with him and the shadows in her childhood away. 

“I’m so sorry, my Alex.” Warren says it, and to his surprise he actually _means it_. Alex Reagan’s screams will wake him up for longer than he’d ever admit to. 

When it’s done, two members of his team carry her back to an apartment that has been wiped of his presence. Alex Reagan is diagnosed with mono and spends six weeks recovering. 

Warren misses her. He mourns. 

But time progresses, at any point during it, Warren is aware of what Alex is doing, where she is, what her life is like. He’s too angry to be pleased that his plan is coming to fruition when Alex finally meets Richard and he breaks a phone when he hears the first interaction between them. 

He’d made the mold for the key, but for the first time Warren wonders at what cost. 

There are daily briefings on Alex and Richard then. Warren knows her curiosity well, and he knows about her digging. He knows that she’s going to be the one to flush out Coralee, killing two birds with one stone. He should relish it, but he can’t. 

The Daeva Corp staff starts automatically having new phones ready on Tuesdays; it’s like a penance for him to need to listen to his Alex and the key become closer. She’s moving Richard, reshaping him in the same way that she had him only this time the results are going to be different. Honestly Warren wonders if Alex Reagan knows just how close she’d come to death at the hands of Coralee Strand more than once. 

Finally, Warren can’t take it anymore. He needs to see her again. Talk to her. Travis Colinwood came to him then and he reached out and offered Carl Jenkins a job interview with Daeva Corp through his assistant and then he took a great glee pretending to be Strand himself in order to get Jenkins come to another job interview at the University with Strand. 

Watching Alex arrive, Warren becomes breathless. All of the promise in her was more than fulfilled. He’d seen pictures of her daily since she’d recovered but to see her here and alive and _herself_ it makes the heart that is supposed to be centuries dead pulse faster. He wants to walk over there and trace his tongue over the constellation freckles on her shoulders, he wants to kiss the one on her breast bone. Warren is close enough that he can hear Alex call Strand 'Richard’ and he wants to tear the Key’s name from her lips. 

But then Nic’s arranged phone call comes through, and he just waits for Jekins to call. And then she’s alone. Alex just picks up her coffee and takes a sip of it and Warren remembers all of the things that she can do with her mouth and he wants to take her away right there. 

He’s waited long enough. Too long when Warren walks to her table and just sits in Strand’s seat and watches her for a moment. She stares in return and then shifts in her seat—nervousness he knows. Interest. Alex is trying to remember where she knows him from. It’s gratifying for him to listen to her later describe him as so attractive because that’s the point. “ _I’m sorry, that seat’s taken._ ” Tiamat, her voice is so familiar it makes the ache in his chest acute and sharp. 

“ _Is it?_ ” It is, it _should be_. And not by the Key. He just watches her for a moment, watching her as she frowns, as she just replies: 

“ _Yes._ ” But there’s a bit of a question behind it, and he can see Alex trying to puzzle it out, who he is out. She knows, on some deep level that it’s not as simple as his being Carl Jenkins. 

“ _Are you recording this? _” Of course she is, there’s no way that she’s not, not when it’s something for the show. Not when he has heard her talking about how it doesn’t run out of tape. But he wants _confirmation_. Warren wants to know that she’s going to go back and listen to it, to be as much of her puzzle as the Key is. __

__“ _I'm sorry, who are you?_ ” There’s a long pause and the two of them just look at one another, and for the first time that he can think of, Warren wishes that the machine would have failed, would have been less absolute. He finds himself praying to Tiamat to hear his name falling from her lips again, but instead the moment is broken, and Alex just asks: “ _Carl?_ ” _ _

__“ _I'm sorry I'm late._ ” There’s anger in his tone that he can’t quite help when he replies--she has no idea how very late he actually is. Which is why her response makes him sting. What is an hour when there’s years he’s missing. “ _As I said. I’m sorry._ ”_ _

__She doesn’t look any less annoyed, and Tiamat she’s beautiful when she’s annoyed. When she just sighs like that. He wants to remind her of so many things, but he knows that the Key is going to be returning soon, and he doesn’t have the time to do that. So, instead that angry tone just keeps going through: “ _You’re here with Richard Strand._ ” _ _

__Alex just looks a little worried, and she hastily adds: “ _and my producer. They’re just out front._ ” But it’s not close enough, he could just take her. Bring her home with him. Let Richard sort everything else on his own. Instead, she just shifts again, and she’s ignoring how unsettled that she feels. “ _So, what is it you wanted to tell me about Travis Collinwood? I understand he died shortly after leaving the Strand Institute_?”_ _

__“ _You have_ quite _an imagination, Alex._ ” Her name feels like it always did in his mouth, like it belongs there. Oh, perhaps he shouldn’t have said it, not with the loomingness of the Key. He can’t afford a confrontation with him, not yet. Not now. So he just brushes past the indignant scowl that she gives him, and takes Richard’s coffee and is gone immediately before Richard or Nic could stop him. _ _

__Or before he could stop himself._ _

__Warren can wait. He’s used to waiting. Used to the slow crawling of a human concept of time that he’s not been a part of in centuries. But it crawls by. The months without the show crawl on and he has his staff hack into the cloud of PNWS in order to get the things that she’d recorded for Tanis, the moments that didn’t make it into the show itself. When Alex goes to find Richard, when he’s alerted that she’s on a flight to Chicago, Warren knows that he should be pleased. He should be _grateful_ because it means that this damned waiting is going to come to an end. _ _

__He tells himself he’s not jealous. He tells himself he doesn’t care about the unrecorded intimacy between Alex and Strand. He lies that it’s a good thing--a _necessary thing._ But he breaks more phones and becomes more demanding as Warren can feel Alex’s trembling steps into the web that he’s been spinning around himself before her great grandparents were alive. When Alex is forced onto her vacation, Warren tries to take pride in the fact that he’s the only one who knows where she is, the only one who could find her. Richard would never even dare to look for her through his abilities. Not yet, and Nic doesn’t have them. The code that they’d sent, the minions that he’d lost in the war between himself and Simon Reese have done their job. _ _

__Alex is alone and vulnerable. He waits for some word that the walls in her head that he’d placed there have broken. He listens to her sleep recordings; he watches in her windows but for all of Alex’s belief in the shadows, Warren knows that it’s nothing more than the dream remnants. It’s not enough. It’s not _concrete_. _ _

__Coralee, (damn her. Fucking damn her) has been trying to interfere with what he’d sacrificed to bring the Key to full power. She’s been in contact with Richard, but Warren doesn’t know how. Alex being Alex has dug out the connections that Coralee may have to the Cult, but her own still remained distant and silent. Patience was becoming thin and as soon as he knows that Alex knows about Richard’s past, as soon as she confronts him on it, it should be done. It should be finished. Alex has done her job, and she should be free._ _

__So, he sends the last of the Hauster recordings, Warren sends the last of Mysterium, played where it was always meant to for all of her thoughts about Turkey. For once, Warren knows where Simon is: safely on the other side of the planet and not within bilocation range. Coralee’s little spies are everywhere, and this was the reason that he’d kept two around so that they could scurry back to her and report the meeting that he’d finally allowed._ _

__It’s a good show, and it needs to be. Coralee needs to be in fear for the Key. She needs to come in and play the hero. But she’s always been a jealous hero, and Warren is counting on that. But he didn’t count on Richard. Warren didn’t count on Alex actually apologizing to the Key. He didn’t count on the fact that Richard might make sure that Alex got into the van--that he could draw on the connection between them. It’s a mistake that causes Warren to lose three men in his anger, and he knows that he needs to. He needs to see her. The very way that Strand uses Alex to set up a meeting (even if he doesn’t know _how_ he’d done it) makes the man currently known as Thomas Warren want to kill him. _ _

__Something inside of him hisses in Sumarian that he’s too attached to something that doesn’t belong to Warren, but he doesn’t care. Richard Strand is the Key, but Alex Reagan has shaped him, has made him believe even with how much he denies it. Warren can see it in him, the way that his abilities bleed past the shell in his anger. Richard is a child, and Warren wonders what his abilities are telling him about what’s happening here, but he can’t deny the way that Strand seems to get closer to Alex the longer he speaks to them._ _

__It is with no little amount of relish that Warren destroys whatever little amount of delusion Alex has in Richard when he tells her about how the million dollars is a lie (even if strictly speaking it’s not). The enjoyment of needling Richard over Howard’s ‘death’ helps too, and he needs to keep his attention on Strand so that he doesn’t do anything rash. Rashness is best left to Richard Strand. Warren has spent his lifetime studying and preparing the Strand family, and he knows what’s going to happen next: Richard will run away again, letting these new doubts and knowledge devour him as he goes to lick his wounds._ _

__It is with no small amount of satisfaction that he learns of Richard’s open ended tickets to Italy. After five days, Warren breathes once more. This time. This time it’ll stick—it has to._ _

__It’s becoming apparent that Alex Reagan is always something he’s going to underestimate. She doesn’t come to him for answers. She doesn’t curl up and wither when Richard is gone. Instead, she keeps searching in her own way, giving Warren and Daeva Corp a wide berth in her investigations. Even when a month later there is the first true sign that Simon Reese was right and she starts to fall apart again Alex doesn’t come to him._ _

__Strand doesn’t come to her either, not for months and it’s little comfort. It seems like everything has been for naught and not for the first time, Thomas Warren hates Richard Strand with everything inside of him._ _

__Just when he’s about to crack, Richard comes back home. He comes home and Alex practically moves into Howard’s house on First Street, and Warren kills the next person he hooks up to the machine. Whatever control that he’d had is rapidly spiraling beyond his grasp, and Warren is aware of it. But he still returns the calls she makes to him, and there’s something gratifying for him in the fact that Alex Reagan called him twenty times herself before he called her back. He doesn’t think about how it’s a miracle and Tiamat’s will that he lasted that long._ _

__Warren doesn’t think about how he disobeys her wishes to set up that meeting to see Alex again._ _

__When he asks if Richard is with her, he hopes that the Key isn’t. He prays to Tiamat that she’s not, but _of course_ he is. So, he toys with Richard again, letting him believe that he thinks that Howard found the Horn, even though he knows that he didn’t. The Horn of Tiamat is still out there, and Howard’s hands didn’t touch it--Warren’s done enough to the man that after over a decade he finally believes him--but he wants Richard to think he did. He wants him to focus on Howard, and how deep into Tiamat he was. _ _

__What Thomas Warren really wants Richard Strand to know is just how much he’d orchestrated every bit of the man’s life, including the beautiful woman who Warren knows owns both of their hearts._ _

__So, he lets her go to Turkey, and he knows that what Simon gives her in the Horn of Tiamat. Things are spiralling outwards, speeding like a train and it almost feels as if the entire supernatural world is holding its breath waiting on the actions of a single woman and what she uncovers. Richard Strand is the one who will open the door, but Alex Reagan is the one who will lead him there. One way or another. Richard needs to go to Geneva, and he needs to choose to go to Geneva. Warren knows now that Alex is the one that is going to make him choose to do it._ _

__He should have taken her when she shows up to the meeting about the Horn, and Warren knows it. Alex is there and so angry and cavalier it makes him want to snarl at her. It makes him want to drag his fingers through her hair and kiss her until she remembers. It makes him want to take her to the machine again to make her forget Richard so that he can start again. But most of all, he wants to laugh at the insolence she shows him._ _

__The recording is there, however, so Richard is there and Thomas Warren just plays the villain who he’s supposed to be. Alex doesn’t know it yet, but this is her last chance to get out and leave all of this (and _him_ , even _him_ ) behind her. Oh, Warren knows that Alex wouldn’t take it, she never would have, but he needed to give it to her nonetheless. If nothing else, perhaps it will let him sleep better at night. _ _

__(It doesn’t. He dreams of Alex as he used to dream of Tiamat. The Goddess is displeased.)_ _

__Tiamat’s displeasure washes over him once more, and Warren knows that he is the one who is almost out of time, and that he needs to escalate things. Richard needs to go to Geneva, and Warren knows how to get him to choose to do it. (It’s a choice Warren himself would have made, even if he won’t admit it to himself. But he would have, if their roles were reversed.) So, he sends his Daeva Corp people to take Alex from where she sleeps, finally, at home. But he didn’t count on Simon, didn’t know that he no longer had a strictly physical form. Simon Reese kills five of his men that night protecting Alex Reagan as she slept, and she doesn’t even know it._ _

__In the end Warren sends her the video that he took, he listens to her be upset that someone was in her apartment. When she moves into Howard’s house, Warren just unleashes the next part of his plan: Howard himself. Howard had always tried to save Richard from the darkness of his destiny, but it won’t do any good. Of course they’re coming to Geneva. Even when he receives word that Alex has purchased tickets elsewhere, Warren knows that she will bring the Key to him. Tiamat may not know it, but _he does_. _ _

__The Goddess has promised him anything he wants as his reward, and what he wants is Alex Reagan. They will come, she will be _his_. _ _

__One way, or another._ _


End file.
